She Was Forced to Wear Black and Sit in Silence… Until the Feared Duke of War Chose Her

Chapter 23

The snow came early that year, and it came hard, and Ravenmoor House turned white at the windows and warm at the hearths, and Rosalind began, in December, to be ill in the mornings.

It took her four days to understand what it meant, and another two to say it aloud.

She said it on a morning when the light was very clean and bright off the snow, standing in the bedroom with her hand on the windowsill. He was in the room. He had been halfway through putting on his coat, and he turned, and she watched his face change.

He asked her twice if she was certain. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed, which she had never once seen him do in daylight hours, and he put his head in his hands.

“Alistair.”

“I am here.”

“Look at me.”

He looked up. His eyes were wet. He had the face of a man standing on a cliff edge.

“I am frightened,” he said. “I did not think I would be. I had thought that when it happened I would be — I have been preparing for this for two years, I have run through it in my head a hundred times, the doctor, the room, the—” He stopped. “I am frightened out of my wits and I cannot pretend otherwise.”

Rosalind crossed the room and took his face in both her hands.

“Listen to me,” she said. “I am not Celia. She was gentle and she was ill-used and she had nobody, and I am none of those things. I am difficult, and I have spent three years in the worst room in London and I walked out of it. I will survive this.”

He put his hands over hers.

“And the child will survive,” she said. “And so will I. Do you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“She will survive,” he said, “and so will you.”

The winter was long, and she was sick for much of it — sicker than the doctor liked, though he was careful not to say so in front of the Duke, and Rosalind made him say it in front of her instead, in a closed room, honestly, because she had decided years ago that she would rather have the truth all at once.

There were two bad nights in February, when she bled and the physician was sent for and the household woke at three in the morning and the Duke of Ravenmoor stood in the corridor outside her door for four hours without sitting down.

She was holding the jet locket.

She had not worn it since the day she left her father’s study. It was in the drawer with the crimson letters, and Nell had brought it, without being asked, because Nell had been with her for eleven years and knew things that did not need explaining.

“It is a curse,” Nell said.

“It is a piece of jet on a ribbon,” Rosalind said, and put it in her palm anyway, and held it, and did not sleep.

She did not lose the child.

In the morning the physician came again and listened and said the words they had been waiting for, in his dry professional way, and Rosalind lay back against the pillows in the gray light and looked at the ceiling and said, aloud, to nobody:

“I told you.”